What trading a basketball player for an arms dealer says about US-Russia power dynamics

What it says to me is that one side holds a significantly more potent hand than the other. This exchange is a symbolic manifestation of American decline. Americans generally won’t notice. After all, every American knows Putin is evil, and freeing a Black lesbian from the clutches of an evil homophobic dictator can be sold to the US public as a triumph of Western values. You know; democracy, human rights, freedom of speech… all that good stuff that our ruling elite squelch at home but promote abroad. PM Fluffy is all for anti-government protests in Iran and China, but God forbid, not in freedom-loving democratic Canada. By all accounts, the Russian arms dealer was a serious person. He made serious money arranging the delivery of serious weapons to a variety of the enemies of Western values, resistance groups all over the world. The American basketball player was just a basketball player. This exchange occurs in the shadow of the US/NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. Western media have assured us Ukraine has been winning this war since February. It is considered impolite in the American vassalsphere to question that fundamental truth. After all, we have been treated non-stop to reportage praising the many glorious imaginary victories of the UAF. They drove the Russians out of Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson. They have the momentum! Momentum or not, their geography has shrunk by 20% and their GDP by 40%. How is that “winning?” How is that momentum? Ukraine lost this war in February. The collective “West,” the aforementioned vassalsphere, orchestrated by Washington, has invested many billions of dollars in keeping it going. If our US masters, leaders of the “free world,” trade a basketball player for an international arms trafficker, I’m reading weakness on the cusp of disintegration. American exceptionalism and the empire it spawned are well past their stale date. Canadians should consider how tightly they want to tie their ship of state to an empire in obvious decline.